When writing a personal history, it can seem to be a daunting task. How do you choose what you should put in a personal history? When looking at all the experiences that one has in a lifetime how do you choose what is the most important? And how do you interview someone in order to get to the stories that really matter?
The first thing that you need to do is go into the interview with a list of questions. Start with the basics: Where was she born? Who were her parents? What was her family like? Then ask about her childhood. Ask about what the world was like around her. Was she aware of what was happening? What experiences stand out in her memory? How did she meet her husband? What was it like when she first had children? As the interview progresses you should begin to move forward in time. However if your interviewee begins to jump from one story to the next, let her continue talking. Interviewing in the correct order is much less important than hearing the stories that she wants to share.
You will also want to record the interview. Many people will record it onto audio tapes, so that they can play back the tapes as they transcribe the stories. It is also a good idea to set up a video camera and record the person onto some type of video. When using video it is important to make sure that the lighting is good. You don’t want to set up your interview with the person sitting in front of a window, so all that you see is a shadow. You will also want to make sure that you can hear the person and eliminate all possible background noise. When interviewing you can have your person sitting in a setting like the kitchen or a workshop to represent where they spent most of their time.
Another thing that you will want to do when compiling a personal history is to gather photos of the person you are interviewing and old videos. You can copy and compile them into a photo album to go along with the personal history. If you are comfortable with a video camera and editing on a computer, you can put together a video presentation using the interview, scanned photos, and old photos and burn it onto DVD. If you take this approach, it would also be nice to include other interviews from the person’s spouse, children, brothers and sisters, and friends.
You could easily put together a nice multimedia project, which would include the personal history in the form of a book, with the compiled photo album and scrapbook with the addition of the DVD. I know several people who have done this, and their families truly treasure the result.